Dave Crane throwing words and pictures together to see what happens. New pictures every Tuesday, words every now and then.

July 7, 2015December 29, 2015

English Magicians

I have been remiss in recent months in entertaining my readers with works of fan fiction – this will not do, sir, this will not do! By way of amends, it is my great pleasure this week to present some illustrations of the fabulous “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”.

(switching back to 21st Century English…)

The TV series was so visually perfect, and the acting of a universally high standard, it’s been hard to pick any scenes – these two have been taken essentially at random. I wanted to experiment with my digital cross-hatching techniques – normally reserved for my own improvised comics work – with something darker and visually richer – and also to play around with adding a few found objects, to add to the atmosphere. The second scene, featuring Stephen Black and Mr Segundus, was an experiment in adding in the sort of lengthy footnotes to a comic-book narrative that make the original novel such a deeply immersive pleasure.

The characters in the story are copyright of Susanna Clarke, and the images that my drawings are based on are copyright the BBC. This is just a piece of “fan fiction”, unlike the majority of my work.